


The Sunless Place

by talefeathers



Category: The Authority
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 11:11:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18030617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talefeathers/pseuds/talefeathers
Summary: The Carrier takes The Authority into deep, sunless space, with no explanation as to why. As the days without sunlight stack up, Apollo begins to feel the effects, and Midnighter begins to worry.





	The Sunless Place

**Day 8**

The Carrier had taken them to sunless places before, but never for this long.

Angie had been trying to coax a reason for this unsettling detour from the shiftship for three days to no avail. It was beginning to feel as if there was just as much yawning blankness inside the Carrier as there was outside—a feeling none of them particularly liked.

“It’s starting to seem to me like the damn thing needs a little kicking around,” Midnighter growled.

“For the five-hundredth time, that’ll only make things worse,” Angie said with a pointed look. “When she doesn’t talk to me, it’s almost always because she’s frightened.”

“Or she’s been hacked,” Midnighter reminded her. Now it was Angie’s turn to growl. “What? Are you sure she hasn’t given the reins to some telepathic jackass? You’ve checked all the conduits? You’ve made _absolutely sure—?_ ”

“Look, I am doing every _single_ thing I can, okay?” Angie snapped, rounding on him. “And I’d be doing it one hell of a lot faster if you’d quit telling me how to do my job!”

For a moment Midnighter thought she would strike, falling into the trap of the fight computer in his brain. Then Angie sighed, letting the tension fall from her frame as she turned back to the navigation console.

“I know you’re worried about him,” she murmured. “I’m worried, too. But you’re not helping him—or me, for that matter—by breathing down my neck like this.”

Midnighter said nothing. He concentrated on uncurling his hands from the fists they had become.

“You should be bugging _him_ right now,” Angie continued, grinning at him a little over her shoulder. “I’m sure he could use the distraction.”

Midnighter exhaled.

“You’re right,” he grumbled. “You’re right, it’s just—I hate just sitting there and watching this happen to him. I feel like I should be doing more, you know? I should be…” He huffed a bitter laugh. “I should be saving him.”

Angie’s smile softened.

“Yeah, I guess none of us would be here if we didn’t have a bit of a hero complex, huh?” she said. “But I think you know better than I do that there’s more than one way to save someone.”

Midnighter quirked an eyebrow.

“We’re talking about sexual healing now, right?”

“Oh my God,” Angie groaned, rolling her eyes as she turned back to the console. “Go talk to your husband, Midnighter.”

**Day 14**

Apollo opened his eyes, as he always did, with a bleary smile. Midnighter had watched this little daybreak every morning since he could remember, but his heart still warmed inside him each time as if it were the first.

“Sorry to wake you,” Midnighter said. “But it’s been almost ten hours.”

“God, that long?” Apollo scrubbed his hands over his face and yawned. “Sorry.”

Midnighter shrugged.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Like I slept for half that time,” Apollo said.

He pulled the comforter up around his shoulders, but not before Midnighter saw that he was shivering.

“You’ll feel better if you stretch your legs a bit,” Midnighter said.

It wasn’t true, and both of them knew it, but it looked like Apollo still had the energy to humor him, at least. To Midnighter’s relief, Apollo pushed himself up and stood, stretching his arms to the ceiling.

“You’re right; I feel better already,” he grinned.

“You’re full of shit,” Midnighter replied, but not without a grin of his own.

“So I guess Angie still hasn’t gotten anything out of the Carrier, then,” Apollo said.

“Not a peep.”

Apollo shrugged, leaving a peck on Midnighter’s cheek before moving to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Midnighter followed him and leaned in the doorway, the computer in his brain pinging off every weakness in Apollo’s frame.

“Exactly how dependent on sunlight did Bendix make you?” Midnighter asked. “You need it for your powers—your strength, your flight, things like that. But do you need it for. Anything else?”

Apollo spat toothpaste into the basin.

“Well, the stuff we all need it for, I imagine. Vitamin D and all that,” he said.

“Apollo,” Midnighter said, more sharply than he’d meant to. Apollo turned to face him, concern creasing into his brow. Midnighter was silent for a moment before speaking again, voice low.

“None of the rest of us is sleeping for ten hours after being awake for four,” he said.

Apollo sighed.

“The short answer is, I don’t know,” he said. “I only know what I gain from the sun; I haven’t had much opportunity before now to find out what I lose when it’s gone. Not for this long.”

Midnighter nodded, jaw tight.

“It’ll be alright,” Apollo continued, moving to pull Midnighter against him. He was cool to the touch where once he’d radiated warmth. “Between Angie and Shen and Jeroen? Someone will figure this out.”

Midnighter pressed his face into Apollo’s shoulder and hoped he was right.

**Day 21**

“You need to let me into the engine room.”

Midnighter didn’t shout this time; he didn’t even snarl. For once, he didn’t feel like a man about to start a bar fight. He felt worse. He felt empty.

“I want to talk to her,” he said, once Angie had turned from the control panel to face him. “I just want to talk.”

Angie hesitated, and Midnighter couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t exactly famous for talking things through. After a moment’s thought, however, she held her hand out to him. He took it, and she led him to the heart of the Carrier.

“Just give me a buzz on the comm when you’re done,” she said. Then, after another moment’s hesitation: “And please don’t do anything stupid.”

Midnighter nodded. Angie bit her lip, then pulled Midnighter into a brief hug before stepping back out into the bridge.

Midnighter took a deep breath in through his nose and exhaled it slowly through his mouth. Then he turned to face the nebulous blue glow that was the Carrier’s heart.

“Angie tells me that when you get quiet like this, it’s because you’re scared,” he said. “And that’s okay. I think you’d have to be crazy not to be scared in this line of work. People have tried to hurt you in order to get to us, and some of them have succeeded, and. And I’m sorry about that. And it’s okay for you to be scared.”

He took a few slow steps toward the Carrier before sitting, cross-legged, on the floor before her, gazing up into her extra-dimensional blue light.

“But I’m scared, too,” he said. “I’m scared because someone. Very important to me. He’s dying.” He swallowed. “He’s stopped waking up, he’s—he’s suffocating. The longer we stay away from the sun—from _a_ sun—he. He just. He needs it, you know? More than any of us do. And I can’t—I don’t know what I’d do. Without him. I don’t know who I _am_ without him.”

He sucked in a breath and held it until he was sure it wasn’t a sob.

“I want to help him,” he continued, voice thin. “I want to save him—more than anything—but I can’t, there’s—there’s nothing I can do except sit and watch and—and beg. Beg _you._ Because you’re the only one who can do this, who can—who can put the light back in his eyes.”

He bowed his head when his voice broke, when tears spilled over his cheeks despite his best efforts. He gave a weak shrug.

“I know you don’t have much of a stake in this. There’s no reason you’d want to save him as much as I do. He isn’t the sun in your sky, just—just another human hitching a ride. Another parasite. I know. But I have to try to make you understand what he is to me. I have to try to make you care, because you’re the only hope he’s got left. And he’s everything to me. He’s everything.”

Midnighter was crying in earnest now. He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them as his shoulders shook with sobs.

“I know you’re scared,” he wept. “But please don’t take him from me. Please.”

There was silence for a long time, broken only by Midnighter’s sharply taken breaths; his bitter, heaving exhales. It wasn't until his shudders had nearly subsided that another sound burst through the engine room: Angie's voice, loud and jubilant.

“Midnighter!” she shouted, barrelling into the room, catching him roughly around the shoulders. “Midnighter, we hit a solar system,” she said. “We have a sun.”

**Day 22**

Apollo opened his eyes, as he always did, with a bleary smile.

“How long was I out?” he started to ask, but Midnighter stopped him with a long, tear-salted kiss.

“That long, huh?” Apollo chuckled when he was finally allowed to breathe.

“Please don’t ruin this by talking,” Midnighter quipped gruffly. Apollo laughed again, but obliged, sinking silently into a second kiss.


End file.
